Donna Savastio

Donna Savastio is a painter and printmaker who has been pursuing her own response to the landscape for several decades. She and her husband bought a cottage deep in the woods of Maine, and since then, Donna has been capturing the mood of what she perceives is going on around her. She states: “I seek to share the strong mystery that I feel when I am in the woods, knowing that there are many things going on around me that I am not privy to.”

Donna studied Fine Arts at the University of Wisconsin. She has shown her work on both the east and west coasts, and her work is in several permanent collections.

Artist’s Statement

My work starts from nature, but rather than trying to imitate its appearance, I want to reorder the landscape to reflect the way that I experience it. My foremost concerns are light and color, which I use as agents of volume and form as well as mood. The mood is very important to the work, and I alter color and composition as necessary, my goal being the depiction of my personal response to the landscape.

Traditionally, the aim of landscape painting was to record a realistic portrayal of a scene or vista. I put myself in the middle of nature so that I can truly experience it instead of merely being an observer. While I love the beauty and philosophy of the genre and want to set my work in that historic continuum, I don’t want to be limited by it. Instead, I seek to share the strong feeling of mystery that I feel when I am in the woods, knowing that there are many things going on around me that I am not privy to.

I use several strategies for identifying and translating my own very personal response to the landscape. Traditional materials and methods are employed. My paintings have many layers of glazing, my prints employ different intaglio techniques, and my drawings are made with ink, brushes, and bamboo pens. The square format black and white photographs that I shoot in the field are key to my process. The photos help me to gather information from my time spent in the woods, aiding my memory later when working in the studio. They also provide me with an index card-like reminder of specific moments that are memorable. The square format from the photos often transfers to my images, helping me move away from the horizontally-oriented shape of a conventional landscape painting.